Troubled hearts

Dalrymple’s latest BMJ column (subscription required) is a look at heart disease in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier:

It sometimes seems as if the respect given to doctors, or at least to doctors’ orders, is inversely proportional to the state of medical knowledge. The more we know (as a profession, I mean, not as individuals), the less uncritically we are believed.

The best known book of Ford Hermann Hueffer (1873–1939), who changed his name to the less Germanic sounding Ford Madox Ford, was The Good Soldier. It is an exceedingly complex love story, first published in 1915, and is more eternal octagon than triangle. It would be an excellent intellectual exercise to summarise it in, say, 30 words, but I won’t even try.

However, heart disease, or alleged heart disease, plays a large part, as well as the self confident but ignorant pronouncements of doctors. Two of the four most important characters are supposed to have such disease. Edward Ashburnham, a philandering British officer, supposedly has heart trouble: “a heart,” in the parlance of the day, brought on by “approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth.”